One Month Later: Wrath in Review

Wrath of the Lich King has been out for about a month, so now might be a good time to step back and reflect on all the new things that have happened, and how this game has changed. This will be a two-part series; in this post, I'll talk about the initial impressions of Northrend while leveling, and the follow up will discuss my admittedly limited impression of the end game (classes, specs, itemization, etc).

Leveling

I've leveled to 80 on my mage. Ghostcrawler mentioned that if you already have a level 80, you're pretty hardcore -- I guess that means my guild has a lot of hardcore players, since there's about 14 people that are 80 by now. I took my time with it and did it in about 2 weeks -- and that takes into account the fact that I would switch to my pally or druid in the early levels to tank or heal instances that didn't need dps. Leveling seems much easier than before, the quests are remarkably easier and even fun, in some cases. So easy, in fact, that I've been leveling other toons at the same time, so that now my druid is 78 and my paladin is 72. Pretty soon, I'll have two 80s -- the first person in my guild to accomplish that, but a measly feat compared to the efforts of some others on my server. Within a few days of the Wrath release, an Alliance warrior hit level 80 for the server first, and then a few days later, his Death Knight hit 80 to become the server first 80 Death Knight. I don't know whether to congratulate him or tranq him with an elephant sedative.

Death Knights

I was about 74-75 when the influx of power-leveling death knights hit Northrend, and ever since then we've been plagued (no pun, etc) with death knights of various calibers, all convinced they can solo Elune with only their pet. Some of them are fairly good, most of them are just OP, and a few are just resoundingly bad. It's one of those classes where you could just button mash and do decently on the meters, but the thing that irks me the most about them isn't how OP they are, but how cocky so many of them seem to be. Every last one is convinced that they don't need healing except on bosses (protip: yes, you do) or can pull aggro off the real tank with impunity (protip: no, you can't). I've heard from some DKs that they run into problems at the end game, but we'll see. Right now, the greatest variance between them seems to lie in the skill of the player behind them.

I did make one of my own. I intended just to try out the class a bit and reserve my DK name, but to my surprise, the starting zone quests were really fun and engrossing, the class mechanics interesting, and before I knew it, I was level 60 and in Outlands and trying to run a 5-DK Ramparts just like every other DK in the world. Blizzard really did their best to make them feel special and to give them a real backstory and a purpose in this universe, because it feels like a class that a lot of love and care was lavished on -- more so, maybe, than some other classes that have been around for years! But I want to wait to level it until the death knight craze dies down a bit.

Northrend

I love this continent. I loved Outland, too, because it really felt like a different planet, and was suitably flashy and spacey-looking to capture the imagination, but Northrend is something else entirely. It's got a beautiful, lush, Gothic feel to it, the music is sweeping and epic, and for the most part, the annoyances of questing in Outland, which was already a huge step up from questing in Azeroth, were done away with. A lot of the time, I found myself reading the quest text, getting engrossed in the storyline -- and I've already met the Lich King himself on more than one occasion. He's definitely not shy, like Illidan was.

For the most part, the instances were all really easy. We mostly just zerged every instance up to the level 80 ones, not even really taking time to learn boss strats. Once you start getting to Halls of Lightning, however, your tank's defense rating actually starts to matter, your healer's decaying spirit regen starts to make a difference, and all that hit rating that you can't make up because you are 4 levels lower than that level 81 boss really makes the instances become non-trivial. That's a good thing, on a lot of levels, though. My favorite one so far would probably be Utgarde Pinnacle, both because I've only done it once (once on normal, and once on heroic) and because the fights seem geniunely interesting. There are a lot of heavy mobility fights in these new instances. You didn't really have this in Outland, but in Northrend even normal dungeons emphasize quickness and careful repositioning.

Professions

I'm a bit disappointed with the lack of grind-worthy tailoring recipes this time around -- after getting to 410 (which required an epic amount of frostweave cloth by itself) and making my flying carpet just for kicks, I don't really have an incentive to level tailoring past 420 (and that only to get the cloak recipes, which are only available after achieving Loremaster of Northrend). On the plus side, there are new engineering googles out, and since I'm having trouble replacing my mage's headpiece with a true upgrade, I might just have to slog through and make those. The engineering bike is, right now, a little above my pay grade.

I was going to make my pally's second profession Inscription, but now I'm starting to think that there's no need to have an inscriptor of my own. The most useful thing to have had is an Enchanter, but it's too late to level one from scratch. Cooking also seems to be something that I should have leveled when I had the chance, but there's still time -- my druid can be the herber/alchemist and the cook, my pally can mine, and my mage can produce tailoring greens to be DEed for mats. I guess. Might as well get some use out of it..

...to be continued.